Scalable Agile Framework (SaFe) is one of the IT industry’s most effective project management models. The key here is a flexible approach to tasks and processes. SAFe delivers business value in the shortest time possible, and elements like planning, team cooperation or risk management are daily bread. It’s great for implementing Agile practices at an enterprise scale. Learn how to scale Agile and benefit from in the modern fintech organization.
Scaled Agile Framework was introduced by Lean-Agile experts Dean Leffingwell and Drew Jemilo in 2011 and has grown in popularity since then. The SAFe Agile methodology is one of the most preferred agile frameworks.
The SAFe concept revolves around two primary things: the iterative development approach of agile and the lean manufacturing mindset. Functionality-wise, it merges information from lean product development, agile development, systems thinking, and DevOps to improve business agility and help organizations as they grow.
What are the Agile Principles?
To start it all off, it’s good to remind ourselves of the values that guide Agile methodologies. They include:
- Customer satisfaction through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Embracing changing requirements to deliver working solutions efficiently.
- Delivering working software frequently, in short iterations.
- Collaboration between business stakeholders and development teams throughout the project.
- Building projects around motivated individuals and supporting them with the right environment and tools.
- Face-to-face communication is the most efficient and effective method.
- Measuring progress through working software and adjusting processes accordingly.
- Maintaining a sustainable pace for development teams to ensure continuous progress and innovation.
Through these guidelines, we can talk about implementing significant improvements to your organization and further discuss SAFe.
A further background for the Scalable Agile Framework
As businesses grow, SAFe provides a structured approach for scaling agile. There are four configurations in SAFe to accommodate various levels of scale: Essential SAFe, Large Solution SAFe, Portfolio SAFe, and Full SAFe.
Dean Leffingwell and Drew Jemilo released SAFe in 2011. They wanted to help organizations design better software. At the time, companies utilized traditional project management processes to deliver digital products. However, the need to rapidly respond to changing market conditions increased. Yes, there were frameworks to tame challenges, but none of them were fully satisfactory. That’s when SAFe emerged. Today, SAFe is one of the most popular scaled agile delivery frameworks. It also has a vibrant worldwide community of evangelists and daily users.
Pillars of SAFe
The key pillars behind the method are:
- Taking an economic view.
- Applying systems thinking.
- Assuming variability.
- Building incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles.
- Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems.
- Visualizing and limiting work in progress (WIP), reducing batch sizes, and managing queue lengths.
- Applying cadence, synchronizing with cross-domain planning
- Unlocking motivation.
- Decentralizing decision-making.
- Organizing around delivering value.
Plus, some additional core values describe the culture the leadership needs to foster in order to effectively use the framework. They are:
- Alignment. SAFe requires that companies put planning and reflection cadences in place at all levels of the organization. With these in place, everyone understands the current state of the business, the goals, and how everyone should move together to achieve those goals. By synchronizing people and activities regularly, all levels of the portfolio stay in alignment. Information flows both upward and downward in a timely fashion, unlike traditional top-down, command and control structures.
- Transparency. SAFe encourages trust-building behavior, including planning work in smaller batch sizes so problems can surface sooner, providing real-time visibility into backlog progress across levels.
- Built-in quality. In the SAFe framework, agility should never come at the cost of quality. SAFe requires teams at all levels to define what “done” means for each task or project and to bake quality development practices into every working agreement. According to SAFe, there are five key dimensions of built-in quality: flow, architecture and design quality, code quality, system quality, and release quality. The “definition of done” is probably one of the most important principles of SAFe.
- Program execution. Program execution is the heart of SAFe and powers everything else in the framework. Teams and programs must be able to deliver quality, working software, and business value on a regular basis.
Why is the Scaled Agile Framework important in project management?
SAFe is vital in project management for these reasons:
- Scalability: SAFe provides a structured and scalable approach to Agile implementation, allowing organizations to apply Agile principles and practices across large and complex projects involving multiple teams, departments, and stakeholders.
- Alignment: SAFe promotes alignment between business strategy and execution by ensuring that Agile teams work towards common goals and priorities, enhancing organizational agility and responsiveness to market changes.
- Collaboration: SAFe encourages collaboration and communication among teams, enabling seamless integration, coordination, and synchronization of work efforts to deliver value incrementally and consistently.
- Risk Management: SAFe includes built-in mechanisms for risk management, dependency management, and early identification of issues, enabling proactive mitigation strategies and reducing project risks.
- Improved Quality: By focusing on continuous integration, testing, and validation, SAFe emphasizes delivering high-quality products or services, reducing defects, enhancing customer satisfaction, and accelerating time-to-market.
- Empowered Teams: SAFe empowers Agile teams with autonomy, decision-making authority, and clear roles and responsibilities, fostering a culture of accountability, innovation, and continuous improvement.
Overall, the Scaled Agile Framework is important in project management as it provides a structured, scalable, and collaborative approach that enables organizations to effectively navigate complexities, drive business value, and achieve sustainable success in today’s dynamic and competitive market landscape.
Especially in fintech, where market saturation is big. You need every advantage you can get. Not only SAFe, but artificial intelligence as well. Centaur developers are invaluable in implementing market advantages. With SAFe and AI alike.
Benefits of SAFe
The benefits of the Scalable Agile Framework translate directly into business results. As scaling agile results in management, culture, and technology shifts, its benefits are far superior to the challenges.
Some of the most important benefits of SAFe include:
- Improved employee engagement. To scale Agile, one of the primary needs of the organization is the coordination between various individuals from numerous teams and departments under the same umbrella. And this is seamlessly taken care of by scaled agile frameworks.
Leveraging scaled agile frameworks leads organizations to quarterly plan events that bring cross-functional teams together to strategize work while catering to potential dependencies, delivering against corporate goals, and identifying the risks by enabling everyone to aim at quarterly deliverables.
- Alignment of strategy and work. it enables enterprises to strategize and work for the organization’s top-level objectives. This coordination helps to create numerous effects like fostering transparency, boosting cross-team coordination, enabling quick response times, and many more.
In addition, using the Scaled agile framework also represents the need for integrating quality in every development stage. As a result, organizations ultimately tend to shift the quality check from last-minute focus to everyone’s responsibility, as everyone in the organization aims to produce value for customers.
- Quicker time-to-market. According to a Project Management Institute study, 75% of the organizations with higher agility report increased revenue growth of a minimum of 5% year-over-year.
Businesses that leverage scaled agile frameworks have significantly increased customer satisfaction and ROI even with a shorter time-to-market span. Moreover, most agile companies also were confirmed to attract top industry talent than their less agile-valued counterparts.
- Enablement of enterprise-wide visibility. Visibility doesn’t only come from planning. Scales agile framework enables transparency across the organization by connecting and visualizing the responsibility of every team member.
As a result, leaders and managers can get a bigger picture of potential barriers that help lay out a well-thought strategy for work allocation, measuring performance, and gauging the financial impact of their work.
How to scale Agile?
Traditional agile is designed for small teams working on well-defined problems over short periods. Scaling agile to projects with dozens of teams working on complex products over multiyear horizons clearly presents challenges.
Therefore, to scale agile to the needs of a large organization, the following are critical:
- Use multiyear road maps. Initiatives in large organizations often involve multiple projects with long-time horizons. Agile implementations for such initiatives should conform to a long-term road map while maintaining the basic principles of agile.
- Strengthen governance structures. Large-scale implementations involve multiple scrum teams from disparate functions under different leaders, often in dispersed locations. In scaling agile, additional roles should be established to facilitate communication and resolve conflicts.
- Address cross-team dependencies. Often a team requires completed components from another team before proceeding further. Such cross-team dependencies create the need for additional coordination when planning upcoming iterations.
- Consolidate reporting and tracking. In traditional agile, progress can be tracked via burn-down charts or other reports from agile tools, such as Rally or VersionOne. In large-scale agile, team burn-down rates should be combined and fitted into the project-level plans to report overall progress.
- Increase end-to-end quality assurance. Traditional agile relies on functional and unit testing within sprints as well as other quality control processes. In agile at scale, limits on how frequently code can be integrated create a need for dedicated end-to-end (E2E) testing before releasing code to production.
Steps for implementing SAFe
If you are considering going with SAFe, try this checklist to see if you can align the organization and start benefiting.
- Reaching the tipping point
- Train lean-agile change agents
- Train executives, managers, and leaders
- Create a lean-agile center of excellence
- Identify value streams and ARTs (Agile Release Trains)
- Create the implementation plan
- Prepare for ART launch
- Train teams and launch the ART
- Coach the ART execution
- Launch more ARTs and value streams
- Extend to the portfolio
- Sustain and improve
Summary
Implementing something new can be scary. That’s why the best providers are also business consultants. Code & Pepper has experience in fintech development and consulting. We can help you build a digital fintech product that will be used and loved by millions. Try our case study page for results, and think about cooperation. Can you afford not to be SAFe under these competitive market conditions?